bambooXZX's personal blog, mostly dedicated to song lyrics translation from Japanese to English.

Stella no Mahou – Yonakagical

Could possibly be my favorite anime song of the season – truly we are in the fantastic future bass future. I like how R・O・N has been doing a tour of all the electronic / EDM subgenres since he started Stereo Dive Foundation.

This seems to be Kuroki Jinsei’s rather creative debut as lyricist; I look forward to seeing future works. Meanwhile, Kokonoka is a mystery (all I could find out was that he or she seems to be part of an agency called onetrap), which is unfortunate, because this song could make a really great case study on how the roles of composer and arranger can separately affect the final impression of a song, something that’s not always clear.

The title of the song is presumably a play on ‘yonaka‘ (late night / midnight) and ‘magical’. Since the pun doesn’t happen as readily in English, I’ve decided to build on the title of the anime instead.

Ｉｓ ｔｈｉｓ ｇｅｔｔｉｎｇ ｔｈｒｏｕｇｈ ｔｏ ｙｏｕ？
This gaze of longing, standing on tiptoes to reach.
Ｄｒｉｆｔｉｎｇ， Ｉ’ｍ ｗａｓｈｅｄ ａｗａｙ，
And I swim through the entrancing ocean.

Swaying…
Softly…

—

Miscellaneous notes:

I was originally going to title the post ‘Yonakajical’ because I wasn’t sure if the ‘g’ felt natural after portmanteau, but in the end I just went for it.

The second half is more like assorted sounds than words, but some parts are associated with particular feelings while others don’t seem to be, so that’s why half of it disappears in the translation.

Also, an aside: can we call Shii’s sweatervest-plus-sailor-uniform look “Shiicore”? The term is not mine but my friend’s – most of the people in our group are software engineers, and I know I really enjoyed it because it’s like what you see around the computer science campus at my old school but on a whole other level.